Googl[eco]logy

Actually there’re so many ways to make money online…some of them as I can think of:

Marketing stuffs (sales person)

The first common practices over the internet is marketing. So, marketing in this term including selling products to people either it’s a real physical products or infoproducts. You can do this by setting up a website or a webpage for your main gate to get intouch with the customers so you can sell them something, or you can do this by redirecting them to other’s website through ads. What fall into this category are:

• Selling products you’ve created yourself. So you create or manufacture the products yourself, or create an infoproduct which is the easiest way to create a fresh and unique product because everyone is an expert on something
• OPP (Other-People’s-Products): There’re 2 category for this…you either work for other people selling their products as a sales person, or you might build a Joint Venture (JV) relationship known as an Affiliate or Associate. In other word, you’re an independent sales person working for whoever you want to join with.

Setting up eCommerce Store (store owner)

Actually in broad terms, this might be categorized as marketing practice because this all have a lot to do with marketing. But the common definition of ‘e-commerce’ used these days refer to practices where you selling (commonly) physical products or an infoproduct. You might either create your own products or just sourcing them from a wholesaler or dropshipper (another topic on this).

So after you have the products you want to sell, you then set-up your website (storefront), and start advertising the website in order to get more and more traffic to your site in hope for some of those traffic will convert to sales. Or, as the business owner, you might create an affiliate program to independently ‘hire’ people to sell your products out.

Buying and Auctioning used or rare items (pawnshop?)

Needless to say, this business at some extent is a great business because of it’s unlimited profit potential. As you might know, rare, collectibles, historical and customized items can be sold out at much much higher price than when you buy it at the first place. If you just happen to have an eagle-eye and could spot stuffs like that, you can undoubtly get a lot of money selling those items at auctioning sites. One of the biggest auction site on the internet is ebay… you can practically sell anything there. So if you have products and don’t know how to build a website and sell them, you may listing them on ebay and start selling them instantly…

Create an educational website / courses as a membership site (School-type business)

Yes you can create an educational website as purpose to educate or help people on something. But imagine if you have a great stuff you really want to share with people. you may consider to build a membership site which allow people to pay in order to get the valuable informations which will help them times and times in that particular topic, Instead of share it for free.

This will benefit both sides as for you, you can share your thoughts, inventions, etc with other people, and you can even make a living from that. For those people who join the membership program, they’ll get the valuable and researched information instantly without doing the hard part themself. But of course they have to continuely pay for that to get updated informations which they’ll far more apreciate highly than if you just give them freely…

Create a free educational/other high-traffic website and add ‘donation’ option (non-profit organizations)

This basically has some similarities as above. So, instead of make it exclusive, you might try different approaches so that people that have gained benefit out of your site, would be feel obligated, and will try to contribute something even if it’s money. Some examples for this are forums, p2p sharing services, blogs, etc. Actually, if you successfully build up a great say well-moderated forum and grow rapidly as one of the largest forum on particular topic, the donations will obviously HUGE…well…that doesn’t count the ads…

Yeah, in my opinion, even the non-profit organizations are gaining much more profits than they actually needed to run the operations (somebody mention church is a great business?)

Domaining ((un)real Estate business)

Same as the real world, there is an (un)real estate businesses running on cyber world. One of them known as domaining. So, the concept behind domaining is you researching and buy some cheap but great and valuable (many factors on this) domain names, and then offer them back to whoever want to pay far more higher than the first time you bought them. Some important factors on this to consider are the donamin name itself, the demand of particular term of the names, the traffic generated (for used domains), etc…

Ads Exchange

With internet revolution, this type of business tag along…Because of a massive amount of traffic on ads, the traffic itself then become a business. What I mean by this is businesses that run as a central that facilitates ads exchange. Example of websites are adbrite, blogads, Google (adsense & adwords), etc. Taking Google as sample, Adwords is created as a one-place-to-go to facilitate advertisers to advertise their business. And Adsense in the other hand positioned as the channel to publish the ads on whoever’s website that want the ads run on. So as the company that fasilitate the ads exchange, Google get percentage of the ads fee…In this business, it’s all about traffic, connections, and partners. It has nothing to do with conversion or selling rate because both the advertisers and the publishers (website owner) that will responsible on how the ads will perform. The ad-exchange business owner just have to make sure everything run smoothly…well they’re the ‘casino’ of the ads…

Buying and Selling turnkey websites (buying and selling business)

As in real world, you might make a fortune buy buying and selling businesses that are already run. In cyber world, you buy and selling websites. You may track the performance including traffic it generates, maintenance cost, conversion rate, and everything else. You then decide wether that particular website would be potentially profitable or not. If you know exactly how your target website works, and sure that it should be worth far more higher than it is, you may then flip the website and sell it at much higher price. The fortune is almost an instant. If you just think that the website has much higher potential than when you saw it, you might want to try to maintain it for a while and increase the value of that ‘turnkey website’ so that you may decide to sell it at certain price in the future. Some great sites for this is sitepoint.com and digitalpoint.com…

Currency Exchange (Forex~in real world)

Ever heard of digots? Digots were one of the most known eCurrency in currency exchange world, especially in DXinOne world. Well, don’t know what happen to the company but the main principle is the same. You practically can position yourself as eCurrency Exchange (similar to the real currency exchange) and trading eCurrencies such as paypal, e-gold, pecunix, moneybooker, stormpay, and many many many other eCurrencies out there on the internet. To get into this business of course you have to jump in with a bold plan and strategies to build your portfolio so that you don’t miss the potential benefits just because you run out of particular eCurrency when in demand…

Telecommuting Jobs (employee)

Yes you can work and take a job in cyber world…the difference is just you can do your job from your home and computer, because internet will mediate all the conversations, the data flow, and even the salary/commission payment without you have to meet and gather with other co-worker or the business owner in person at a certain place. There’re so many jobs and projects out there…and of course there’re some great place that facilitate those too. Some of them are guru.com, elance.com, rentacoder.com, and the most wellknown is Craiglist…

Freelancing (self-employee)

The difference between freelancing with the other is that to freelancing means to provide a service. So you basically employ yourself on certain expertise that provide some sort of services. You may do this by listing the service you provide on job portal websites such mentioned above, or you may build your own website and start promoting your services throughout the web which is far more professional move to make. You may gain more exposure and respect as a partner if you do so, and of course in some cases, you may charge higher price for your services…

Trading (Investing…or speculating I may say)

If you’re a trader, whatever trader you are, wether it’s stock trader, forex trader, commodity, bonds, options, futures trader, and even a sport betting trader (yeah sport betting odds can be traded too), internet is surely the place that facilitates those to the limit because of the advanced technology that connecting and giving access to people into real-time moving numbers that changing all the time. So you might gain benefits in real time on trading anything from the comfort of your home and pijamas.

Well that’s it for now…The list above refers to white-hat common practices. There’re a lot more ways to make money off the internet from doing the blackhat strategies of course, but I simply won’t recommend it as in my opinion, most of blackhat tactics at some level simply can’t categorize as building a business because it’ll just make you money in short term and in uncertainty.

If you have another way to make money online other than above, please add that through comments so that we can broaden the IM scope…

Tags: make money online